How the Fun went out of Leathercrafting

[Kent]

Dear GM's,

Well, I have definitely given a long (extended period of time) look to the changes that took place in leathercrafting over the past year, and I have to give my retrospect on it.

The major changes that impacted us players were the 50 riln fee to enter the tanner's workshop, the arbitrary increase in the number of skins required to make a leather good, and the effective elimination of the ability to produce Mastercrafted leather goods. (I claim the latter because my character has what I believe to be the highest leathercrafting skill of all the PC's, and yet he has never once been able to produce a single mastercrafted leather item.)

An indirect change was the introduction of encumbrance penalties, which made the out-of-whack weights of most leathercrafted goods unbearable. I recently addressed this in another post. Another indirect change (not taking place in the last month due to player attrition, but earlier) was when many players are playing, the inability to get space in a free tanner's workshop to work in without travelling all the way to Haiban - as Dwaedn Vil was plucked away from Shadgard where it once served as an alternative tanner's shop for Shadgardians).

A suspected other change that I am not sure of, is that permanent downgrade of the quality of leather armors that seems to be more rapid now than it was when I started back two years ago. It seems now like if my character spends a couple of afternoons in combat, the necessary repairs will guarantee a degrade of my exquisite chest, arm, leg, and hand armor down to average or worse. Two days and gone.

As it stands, my character has to charge 80 riln per piece of undyed leather in the item to make it worthwhile for him to harvest the pelts and turn them into an exquisite-quality leather good to sell to another player. For greaves, it takes I believe 8 pieces of leather for a cost of 640 and for a leather cuirass, 15 pieces of leather is required, for a cost of 1200 riln. The last time I did this for a player, two or three days afterward she mailed her damaged goods back to me for repair and they repaired at 'average' quality...all that money down the drain in no time. For this reason I see no point to do any more armor creations for other players under the current system...it's just a waste of their money. I could grind long enough to finally produce something Masterful...only to see it permanently degraded in short order. Sadface.

What I would like to see happen is either (a) the restoration of Mastercrafted leather items back the way it was, or (b) a serious increase in the durability of leather armors such that a player can expect his exquisite leather bracers to last at least a month, and not a couple of days. One or the other, please.


Also I don't think it's fair to charge 50 riln per hour to go into the leather workshop. The overhead for the tanner's equipment (a frame and a worktable, the implied needles and thread) is much less than the corresponding hardware needed for the Blacksmith's Workyard (anvil, bar cutter, furnace and forge with the implied coal needed to fuel the latter two). The crafting of leather is just a smaller, cheaper trade than crafting metal armors and weapons, and the use of the facilities ought to reflect that in a lower fee, say, 30 riln per hour rather than 50.

Another resolution to this would be, instead of lowering the workroom fee to 30 riln, to eliminate the fee altogether and to raise the cost of tanning solution to 10 riln to offset the costs that way. A third resolution, which I like best, would be have a 30 riln per hour fee for leather crafting and also to allow leather goods to be repaired on any table, not just the worktable in the tanner's shop. A variation on this suggestion would not any table, just a worktable, but to allow for the sale of a tailor's worktable in shop for, say, 650 riln, so a player can stitch and repair leather at home. The tanning of leathers is too stinky an ordeal to do at home, so players would still have to go into the Tannery to use the frame to turn pelts into leather and furs.

I would like to see the Tanneries of Shadgard and Mistral Lake have not just one back workroom, but an east workroom and a west workroom. I have in real life seen tailor shops with two or three worktables and two or three tailors efficiently working away there, and the best way to represent this in CLOK would be to have two rooms per tannery to go into, and with the ability to peer into that room to see if someone is already there.

To sum up, the current state of the leatherworking mechanics has taken most of the fun out of going into the tannery, and I hope the GM's see this too and make some changes to make the trade worthwhile again. Some happy changes that took place over the last year included the introduction of new items to craft, such as leather jerkins and bracers, and some container and sheath types, thank you for those.